Former child soldier begins new life in Calgary

This is part one of a two-part series. Check back for part two of this CityNews series Thursday.

When Saif Mito was a child he was taken from his family in Iraq and forcibly trained as an ISIS solider. Now, he’s living a new life and attending university in Calgary.

It’s a story he wants to share with the world — a painful life story from his childhood before he came to Canada.

Mito seems like a typical 21-year-old, with hobbies like playing soccer and video games. But there is nothing typical about his childhood. He says ISIS came into his village in Iraq when he was 12-years-old and killed members of his family because they are part of the Yazidi culture.

“Our parents were killed, and our sisters were taken away from us.”

Mito and his younger brother ended up being taken to ISIS training camps in Syria in the same year he was displaced from his family.

The training included lessons on ISIS ideology and how to use weapons.

“They kind of were trying to indoctrinate us and, of course, we just didn’t know anything. We were just children,” Mito recalled. “We were doing whatever they say. Whoever refused to, there (was) punishment for it. And of course, we had kind of a lecture on military training, they were training us on pistols and AKM.”

Mito says he officially became an ISIS solider in 2017 and was sent to a village on the front line.

“I was all the time lying to them. I told them, ‘I can’t see, I’m wearing glasses and I cannot use the binoculars. I don’t see what the enemy were doing,’ which are the Kurdish forces,” Mito said. “Eventually they sent me inside Raqqa. They told me ‘go, we don’t want you here,’ and I was inside Raqqa for three months and that’s (when) I started planning to escape.

“We were basically just waiting to die because all the time, almost every single day, fighting jets were dropping rockets above the city.”

Mito was able to communicate with his older brother, who arranged an escape plan for Mito and Mito’s younger brother. Mito says he was worried he wouldn’t be able to get his younger brother to come with him.

“The last words that my mother said was to take care of him, and I am glad that I didn’t (leave) him behind or probably I would have never forgiven myself, to leave him. Of course, he would have been killed if I left him behind.”

After Mito and his younger brother escaped, they arrived at a refugee camp, Mito’s older brother remained in Iraq.

Life in the camp was difficult for Mito, as he says housing wasn’t great and there was little to do.

A year later, Mito and his brother were given the opportunity to come to Canada.

“Honestly, I studied geography and all these things in Iraq, but I didn’t know there was a country called Canada,” Mito said. “We just said yes because we wanted to get out of that hell, and we came to Canada.”